I happened to be on the Pentax (US) site, left my computer, came back and pressed the back button on got this...

Quite possibly the worst error message I've ever seen on a website.

I'm not trying to make Pentax look bad - I've seen this situation before. Companies are so entrenched in their SAP system that they're captive to SAP solutions for their websites.

I'm showing this error to make a point about where software is headed. The age of local, installed, client/server software is coming to an end; and that is a good thing for companies. It's obvious that Pentax's SAP-powered website hasn't been updated since 2001 and as a result their site is lagging behind. I'm sure that they could upgrade to a newer version of the SAP module that powers their site, but I'm also sure that the cost of doing so is outrageous. If Pentax had contracted with a company that hosted a web-based software solution, they would have benefited from constant improvements and seamless software upgrades from the beginning. Of course doing so would probably require an enormous leap of faith from management. Management tends to like to own their software. It will be interesting to keep an eye on Pentax to see if/when they move to a new platform what form it will take.

Wednesday, January 3, 2007

Google recently made a significant move for sellers - their Google Checkout product is free until 2008. This move is on the heals of them offering free processing for the holidays unitl 2007.

What does this mean for marketplace sellers? Well if you're selling on eBay exclusively, it's not going to mean much to you given the fact that eBay banned the use of Google Checkout. If you're selling elsewhere, it means about 3% of your sales can stay in your pocket instead of going to PayPal. Even when Google Checkout starts charging again, their transaction fees are about a point lower than PayPal's. So, it seems to be a good time to give Google Checkout a try.

I've been blogging over at the flippid blog since the start of this whole project, but really neglected to throw my own spin on some of the stuff we're doing over there - thus, I thought I'd fire up my own blog here at blogger and start blabbing away. (I'll also be talking about related industry news, and stuff that I think is cool)

What in the world are we doing?

Flippid is a new marketplace (isn't that market bloated enough?). But this marketplace has an emphasis on community. It also flips the marketplace concept around, placing the power in the hands of the buyer.

We're truly aiming to match buyers and sellers in a way that has never been done before. We're already seeing lots of successful matches. iPods, cell phones, computers; the tech crowd is finding what they want.

We let buyers post what they're looking for, and let sellers bid to sell it to them. Haven't you ever wanted to name your price and let folks compete just to sell to you? (I understand there's a glut of PS3's out there.)

So where's the community element? The content on flippid is really powered by user generated content. You don't see fancy ads all over the place - in fact, you don't see any ads at all. Most of the featured content is pulled either by the popularity of the post or by random rotation. We do feature some of the cooler BuyOff's and Ads, but that's just because we want to show off what flippid users are doing. We've got extensible profile pages - you can really go nuts with CSS to customize your profile anyway you want. We've definitely taken a lesson from MySpace in that regard.

We've got RSS feeds for just about everything, neat JavaScript snippets for adding flippid stuff to your own site, and plenty of cool stuff in the works. Check it out if you haven't yet and drop me a line.